The blues

Grams used to sit in the breeze of her porch,
    in the summer of '53,
With Aunt Sue and Pop playing games at her feet,
    and Uncle Joe perched on her knee.
But the porches are gone, and now we just sit
    in our flickering, stacked-up blue tombs.
When a sign of the wise is the bluish glazed eyes,
    we know we're just running on fumes.

Youth

He shuffled along, hunched on his cane,
    over trails that he'd run on so fast.
He was older than then, but younger than when
    today would be part of the past.
Right in between, it's a relative world,
    and we choose from the two ways to see.
So at age ninety-four, he limped all the more,
    saying, "Youth won't be wasted on me."

Things that stick

"You shouldn't make faces - they'll stick that way."
A little white lie that we hear grownups say.
But watch how you act, because one thing is true -
Though faces don't stick, personalities do.

1, 2, 3, . . .

From yelling "surprise," to lifting up rocks,
From rock-paper-scissors, to synchronized clocks,
It's a question profound, and I just want to know:
When do you start, on "3" or on "go"?

The circle game

One for the hopscotch we played in the rain,
Two for the marbles that roll down the drain.
Three for the chalk lines that bend in the years,
Four for the children who follow the spheres.

Five for the swing sets that taught us to fly,
Six for the thought that we never would die.
Seven for lives that we cannot foresee,
Eight for the branch that we add to the tree.

Nine for the vessel, this home we call earth,
Ten for the memory, lost in our birth.
Eleven for sailing a sea with no end,
Twelve for the chimes to begin it again.

The crib

Our race carries on, in perpetual youth,
    with delusions we somehow mature.
As the children grow older, the generations get bolder,
    and we lengthen the crawl on the floor.
But the mind's eye still blinks; we return to our crib,
    carving notches with each passing year.
In this coming of age, we turn in our cage,
    all alone on a tiny blue sphere.

Shoe boxes

Letters and pictures and sympathy notes,
    and pieces of distant old friends
Follow your life, through the joy and the strife,
    in a little box worn on the ends.
Years down the line, you’ll pull from a shelf
    the memories long overdue,
And wonder once more, whose shoe boxes store
    old pictures and pieces of you.